


The True Material Fire of Hell

by Selden



Category: The Duchess of Malfi - Webster
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, F/M, Incest, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 11:01:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4177323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do you think that herbs, or charms<br/>Can force the will?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The True Material Fire of Hell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Set, of course, when Ferdinand comes in the night to the Duchess' bed-chamber.
> 
> (Also, I hope you meant it about A/B/O).

Ferdinand is burning. From within, like a smothered fire, hot humours boiling slimy in his gut, clouding his head, leaving long ashy channels through his insides like the tracks of worms. He is soft inside like rotten fruit.

"Brother," says the Duchess. "Brother, what is it you drank?"

She is staring at him with a white face; he must look very strange. And smell still stranger, if the way she scents the air is any proof. The man who spoilt her is no Omega, then. She is not so lost to uprightness as that. Not yet.

"Brother!"

The dagger he gave her falls, unheeded, from her hand. She reaches forwards, both hands on his face, tilting it upwards. As a mother looks for dirt upon her child, hands gentle and sure.

Her touch is like a tongue poking at a loose milk tooth. Pain bright and sweet as a blown plum, wasp-riddled.

Ferdinand pulls himself away and stumbles backwards to the bed. He falls back across the covers, and his legs sprawl wide, of themselves. A loose creature, made to lie like this, open and undone. He is very wet; his breeches are already soaked through. Sopping. His flesh feels soft and spongy as old fish; as manchet-bread in milk. Like sour rising dough, waiting the grimy imprint of the baker's thumb.

The Duchess looks at her hands. They too are wet, from his face. With sweat most likely. "Brother," she says. "What have you done?"

Ferdinand crooks his legs further open and laughs, high and pleased. Above him, pomegranates open their bellies in ranks across the bed's silken canopy, their gold thread glinting. "Be of good cheer, sweet sister," he says. "I took great care to lock the door." He tugs his ruff open; the starched fabric buckles under his fingers.

The Duchess stares at him. Her eyes are black, and without looking down she raises her hand; licks her palm clean. Every finger too. The air is close and sweet. Sodden with ripeness. She feels it, how could she not? He feels it too, melting in his gut. He is a man of wax, guttering.

 

> For a she-alpha is a kind of double thing, a woman having a man's heart, and shape, at best as we say _Mulier virtutis, & fortis_, capable of bearing, free, says Albertus, from innumerable _foeditates mulierum_ ; made for greatness above their sex, _dux femina factis_ ; at worst a creature inconstant, bicorporal, given to rages, hot lusts, wickedness -

 

"You are the rottenness in my bones, my sister," he tells her. He feels it too, his marrow hot and seething with decay, burning up. The apothecary had told him that one swallow of elixir would bring a heat strong enough to drive a very Beta to madness, but he had drained the little bottle to the dregs. Now he lies under a burning-glass, pinned and spread by curious fingers, the bedcover coarse under his hands, the band at his neck choking him, his cock stiff as if threaded through with golden wire. He claws at the bed with blunt nails.

His sister has him in her hands.

"Soft, soft," she is saying thickly, bending over him. She scrabbles at the points of his breeches, ripping the silken cloth apart. The air of the room is cool on his flushed skin, his damp thighs, his dripping cock, but her hands are hot, as hot as he is. "Soft," she says. "Brother. Brother, I want you."

She holds him at the hips, just below where the thick stiff fabric of his doublet rubs at his waist, rucked-up as far as it will go. Holding his chest together like hoops round a barrel; his hard nipples chafing against his shirt under the shell of padded velvet. A crust for holding in soft meats; a coffin. Her loose hair, let down for bed, brushes against his soft bared belly, coils soft as miniver as she dips her head. It falls like a live thing, like a long dark eel, over the wet curve of his cock where it slaps up against his stomach. Her hair comes away wet, the ends draggled like candle wicks. Her fingernails are sharp.

"Ah, my brother," she says. "I have you now." She curves her fingers; digs her nails in.

He is making, he realises, a high thin noise, a kind of cry. All the pith of him is burnt out, and he is hollow as a sucked egg, as a ruined church. Hollow and empty.

He gets one hand under himself, feels for his arsehole, puffed with blood, aching, wet and greedy to be filled. When he gets a finger inside himself, it is like a benediction.

His sister pulls his hand away.

"Brother," she says. "What have you done to me?"

She is, he understands dimly, weeping.

 

> A wicked creature, _consilium invalidum et instabile_ , _semihomo_ , given to softness, foolishness, sluttery, subject to wanton heats without that gift of the Romans, that noble weed silphium; their bowels possessed with spiritous vapours, the which breathed out bring Alphas to the furthest extremes of lust: a kind of natural subject, a he-Omega -

 

His sister pulls his legs apart. He is still clothed, but for the ruin she has made of his smallclothes and his breeches. But for his cock, his heavy balls, his sloppy hole, he is still most correctly dressed. A gentleman may call upon his sister in her chamber.

"You have poisoned me, brother," she says quietly. "You have fatted me not to be eaten, but to eat."

She clambers up onto the bed, astride his stockinged legs. Her weight presses the fastening of his garters into his thighs: he will bruise there, under the tight knots of the laces. Something falls on his bare stomach, hot and wet. He is dissolving under her, a thing of sugar-paste left out in the rain.

She reaches down with one hand, between his legs. Two of her fingers find his arse and push inside, sure as a hook in the gills of a fish.

"Brother," she says, "brother, I have only you, for you have made me nothing. What is my word now? What name is left to me?"

She curls her fingers, and inside Ferdinand fire catches once again, lust shivering through his gut like veins of mercury. Her other hand holds down his wrist, tight enough that he will bruise there too, her touch caught under his skin. Preserved and purified.

 

In the past he has locked himself away; taken his pills. Silphium, God's gift to Omegas, he and she. To women too, they say. In Omegas it stops all but the shadow of the heat, leaves it an ugly ache in the gut, a dark thing half-felt in cold deep water. Ferdinand has clever cocks-in-hand, dildos of glass and ivory and leather, and he has hired men, too, with strong thighs and thick cocks. He has been continent enough, for what he is. Not like his sister.

He remembers, held clenching round her fingers, her face hidden behind her hanging hair, how his first heat had taken him. Running with her in the gardens, the air heavy with summer dust under the yew trees, clipped in great dark bulging shapes like painted monsters, neither fish nor fowl. They had been too old for children's games, but playing nonetheless, running and chasing. Still like enough that when they wore each other's clothes, her hair pinned up; his hidden under a neat cap of lawn, they could be mistaken by all but their politic brother, who even then would purse his lips and shake his head. _Sauciness_ , he would say, _unfit for heirs of princes. You lead each other astray, brother. Sister._ That day, in the garden, Ferdinand had worn her skirts and waited, breathless, squatting beneath a yew in the mown grass, the sky above him low with summer rain. And he had felt it then, wetness and heat between his legs, a need so sharp that when she found him, curled under the tree like an unlicked bear cub, he had been able, only, to say her name.

How had it been for her? He had never asked, though all the household had known about it. _The girl an Alpha too. And the young prince her twin the other thing. Even for so great a family, it is hard for things to fall out so, all backwards._ A hand in her placket, perhaps. A strange stirring. And when she felt it, what was it she had said? __Ferdinand?_ Brother?  
_

 

"Brother," she says. She pulls her fingers out with a wet, ugly sound; fumbles under her skirts. He is left empty. Cored. Like an apple scooped out with a carved shin-bone, ready for sweetness in winter. He will take what is still pure in her and store it up, like stewed fruit under fat.

"You will fill me, sister," he tells her. "You have bred base cubs from your lechery, but I shall breed princes. And I shall get horns, too, horns on your nameless husband-"

She stoops down and stops his mouth. It is more bite than kiss: one or both of them tastes of blood. It is all the same, though his is clean still and hers is rotten. Her breath smells of aniseed: kissing comfits.

She is hoicking his legs up, lifting the skirts of her nightgown. Pushing her way between his thighs. He helps, holding his legs open sluttishly, fingertips hooked in the top of his stockings. They say she-Alphas have an organ as long as a swan's neck; thick as a conger eel; a thing that comes out from their privities like a pike from a hole in the river-bank, sleek and fat with smaller fish. Above him, his sister bares red teeth.

"Brother," she says, "you use me cruelly." And she gives it to him, filling him up in one long thrust.

She says a name, too, as she fills him. But, stretched around her cock like molten wire pulled thin, he cannot hear it.

His tongue lies like a leech in his mouth.

She fucks into him easily, smoothly, as if she has done this before. If she has truly married a Beta, or something like that raddled old Alpha her first husband, such a thing is impossible, of course. For even an unvirtuous woman. Perhaps there was some wanton maid opened for her, perhaps - he falls back into the burn, the wide deep bruise of his body, the slap of her thighs on his. Her heavy breasts must be swaying, too, pale as alabaster under her nightgown, behind her curtain of hair. But he cannot see her flesh, only feel it in him, hot and thick. Even her face is all but hidden. The candles in the room are burning low.

She has one hand up by his shoulder now, holding her weight. The other is at his mouth, fingers clamped on his lower lip, thumb hooked under his jaw. Bearing down. He reaches up, unsteadily, leaving his legs to splay themselves. His fingers tangle in her thick hair, scrape loosely at her white skin. Her face is dry, now, candied with salt, curving under his fingers as she thrusts into him, grimacing. Grinning. Pygmalion loved a pillar of marble, and fair Narcissus loved his beauteous shadow, he thinks, reaching out. Grasping only her dark hair.

She growls and slaps his hand down; clamps it again at the wrist. Again, he is pinned out, laid open. Anatomised.

"Oh, sister," he says, taking care not to bite his swollen tongue, his body jolted further up the bed with every thrust. "How we have studied to seem the thing we are not."

 

He does not hear the door open; later Bosola will tell him that her clever little number-fumbler of a husband picked the lock. Ferdinand is on his knees by now; knees and elbows, white ropes of spit meeting the bedcover, nails scrabbling at the embroidery as his sister mounts him from behind, nails hooked in his hips. He does not see what face she makes, but he feels her falter, hears her say - something, he cannot tell.

Her cock is growing within him, he can feel that. He is split on it, skewered like a collop of flesh above the fire.

"You take his mouth." That, Ferdinand hears her say quite clearly.

_A heat strong enough to drive a very Beta to madness._

He feels broad hands lifting his jaw; a thumb pressing into his mouth, opening it as if checking the teeth of a horse at market. A cockhead at his lips, already hard and wet. And, silly Omega that he is, he opens his mouth for a base-born Beta, suckling on his unknown brother's cock like a babe at his mother's tit.

As he feels his sister's knot swell and her first pulse of seed hot inside him, he feels her hand leave his hip and reach out above him, to the man whose face he still has not seen, whose name is still unknown even as his cock spills salt over Ferdinand's tongue and down his whorish throat.

Even as Ferdinand's pleasure gathers and resolves, leaving him for a moment nothing, wrung out and undone. His cock dirties the covers under him, untouched. 

And, stuffed at both ends, hung from his sister's knotted yard, his face in the lap of the base creature who stole, he knows, the best of her away from him, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, is for a moment happy. Bloated with seed, blown up like glass as sinners are in hell, his sluttish hole stretched on his sister's prick, he feels himself for once a thing single in form and substance, quite filled up with all that was essential in his sister.

And, content as a dark thing in a still and silent pond, he slips, smiling with puffed and bitten lips, to dreamless sleep.

 

When he wakes, they are fled, of course. It does not concern him. He has all he requires of his sister growing in his womb. The _uterculus_ , the little womb of the he-Omega. Bosola stares at him, cow-eyed; holds up the empty bottle of elixir to the light as if he judges urine. Calls in the apothecary, who makes noises about future heats. Ferdinand, sated and sticky in his sister's bed, bids them be silent.

He sees her again some time later, pale and proud in her suffering; puts on a little show of horrors for her sake. Claps her hand tight to his belly; _Sister, can you feel them kick?_

 

He is swollen glass. An alchemist's flask heavy with its homunculi. And when Bosola tells him that his sister - quite against his will - is dead, the flask shivers and cracks.

Oh, the children grow still. And so does heat, within him, sending him howling, empty and undone into the night. Hair under his skin, growing in thick dark coils, eel-heavy, writhing. He finds men to fuck him - or things, in any case, that look like men - but he stays empty as a hollow bladder, bobbed aloft by a wide-gaping fool. The nights run quick.

Bosola frowns and brings him apricots, and fails, in their last naughty act of death, to run him through.

"You have killed babes before," Ferdinand tells him, kind. "But so. Go to, go to."

Bosola groans and dies. And Ferdinand, still quite alive, yells with the pangs of birth.

 

The children, though they are taken from him very soon, please him by being twins.

And as he twists upon the hook of heat no silphium can soothe, he smiles to think of them, full grown and free, bending to look down at him in his pool of fire. Then turning, one another's perfect shadow, to catch between their lips a true substantial kiss.

 

 


End file.
